It started as a clean sweep and ended in disaster.
Three years after Kevin Durant committed to the Nets alongside Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan, the 6-foot-10 striker called for a change in the organization. Athletic’s Shams Charania first reported the news on Thursday.
Brooklyn begins free agency, which gave notice at 6 p.m. Thursday, in one place: its franchise player, who signed a four-year extension last summer, wants to leave. Never before has a player of Durant’s caliber — a league MVP and a two-time Finals MVP — been available with so many years of control pending his contract. And perhaps never before had a so-called supercomputer fractured in such a dramatic and unpredictable way. The Nets were once considered a potential dynasty. They are now one of the great hypotheticals in NBA history.
At least one major outing for the Nets had been under construction since the end of the season. For a time, it initially seemed that Irving might be the first domino to fall when reports surfaced that the Nets were unwilling to offer him a long-term extension. Durant remained loyal to Irving despite the constant drama, and began to grow skeptical of the organization in part because of staff movements and his tough stance on Irving’s contract. The Nets ’attempt to restore power dynamics eventually became the beginning of the end of the Durant and Irving era that did not realize its massive potential, nor did it meet high expectations.
For three years, Durant and Irving had been successful in Brooklyn repeatedly. They took a pay cut for Jordan to join them in a four-year, $ 40 million deal despite the presence of Jarrett Allen, a promising young center now in Cleveland with a five-year, $ 100 million contract. of dollars. Steve Nash became head coach in part because of his relationship with Durant, and many of his assistants also have ties to Durant. Adam Harrington was Durant’s personal trainer and introduced him to Nash. Brian Keefe worked with Durant for eight years in Oklahoma City, and David Vanterpool comes from Prince George’s County, Maryland, where Durant grew up.
But despite what they gave in loyalty to their star duo, the Nets did not have much performance in results. Part of that was out of his control. When Irving and Durant signed three years ago, COVID-19 did not exist and only international travelers and parents of schoolchildren had to worry about vaccine warrants. Also, Brooklyn’s first year with Durant, 2019-20, was always going to be a wash, as it rehabilitated a broken right Achilles; this was amplified when Irving was limited to only 20 games due to a shoulder impact. Coach Kenny Atkinson then left the organization a week before the pandemic took over the world.
Despite an unceremonious departure from the bubble in the summer of 2020 with a squad that lacked Durant, Irving, Jordan and Spencer Dinwiddie, among others, due to injury and COVID-19, the Nets entered the next preseason, the first with a good Durant, with an elephant in the room: James Harden wanted to join him.
This put Nash in a unique position as a coach for the first time, avoiding questions about a possible highly successful trade while learning the job. With just 13 games in Nash’s coaching career, the Nets changed rising stars Caris LeVert and Allen, along with Taurean Prince and a plethora of future draft picks, to Houston for Harden. Given Durant’s commercial request, one can only imagine the July 4 party the Rockets will host this weekend thinking the Brooklyn election will go up to the draft boards.
Irving was away from the team for personal reasons when Harden was changed, and the big three of the Nets spent the rest of the season playing mostly in pairs and almost never as a trio. During a sprained hamstring injury he made a few weeks after Harden’s change and missed 23 games in a three-month period. Harden suffered a left hamstring strain in April and has not looked like the same player since. And Irving played in 54 games, marking a 50-40-90 season as Brooklyn’s most reliable star, a unique title given his injury history and what has happened since then.
Despite all of those injuries, including another hamstring strain from Harden in the first game of the conference semifinals against Milwaukee and an ankle sprain from Irving in Game 3, the Nets reached an inch from the conference final on 2021 after Durant stepped on the 3-point line. in a miraculous twist shot on PJ Tucker in Game 7. This is the closest these Nets would be to a championship, although Durant later discussed the idea that they were one inch from a title and said no they would have won later rounds due to their workload with Irving and Harden both injured.
Like the previous one, last season started with drama before a game was played. The Nets sidelined Irving for his reluctance to get vaccinated in accordance with the New York City mandate. Still, Brooklyn won early, but at the expense of Durant and Harden’s heavy workloads. When the Nets relented and returned to Irving part-time in late December amid a COVID outbreak, the team began a free fall in the standings. Harden called for a change from Brooklyn and for Interstate 95 to Philadelphia in exchange for Ben Simmons, and broke the supercomputer before anyone had a chance to see what it might be like if everyone stayed healthy.
“We’re so good,” Harden said in January after the trio teamed up for the last time to eliminate the Bulls.
The Nets finished first in the Christmas conference. They finished in the Play-In Tournament.
Ultimately, the lack of a self-produced star may have been the Nets ’biggest shortcoming. The Nets built a culture that gave them enough success to attract Irving and Durant, two stars to whom they showed great loyalty, but without a star they had drafted and developed, it all ended up shelling out. Brooklyn chased old All-Stars like LaMarcus Aldridge and Blake Griffin, who had bursts of productivity but lacked the consistency of the gems they rehabilitated like Harris and Spencer Dinwiddie.
And finding a superstar of his own doesn’t seem to be on the cards for this upcoming incarnation of the team. Simmons, who came from Philadelphia to the Harden trade in February, has not played for more than a year and recently underwent back surgery. And he’s also starred in some of the recent dramas, after he couldn’t make his debut with his team in the postseason after clues he could make it. Could he be on the move too? The Nets want to return multiple All-Stars in exchange for Durant, which would keep them on the hunt for the playoffs and away from the dark hole they were in after their first super team with Deron Williams exploded in 2014.
The only truth of the Nets in recent years has been uncertainty. Durant’s request doesn’t stop him. Now, what happens to Irving, who is presumably out the door with Durant at some point soon? What about Nash, who throughout his tenure as coach has said he doesn’t want to coach a team in rebuilding? Does Marks cling to Harris, the longest-serving player on the team and the only one left of the brief renaissance poster under Atkinson, or does Marks trade Harris for more assets?
And what will the Nets do differently this time? After all, it wasn’t the process of building the supercomputer that brought them this far, but the people they were betting on. Marks has already made the organization laughable to respectable with a more exhausted hand than when he was hired in 2016. What can he do with one of the biggest business returns in NBA history?
The era of the Nets superset, which began with a clean sweep of two superstars and Jordan, has now ended with a sweep of the playoffs at the hands of the Celtics, whose stars came from the elections acquired in the original superstar trade. of Brooklyn to combine Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce with Williams. , Brook Lopez and Joe Johnson. The Celtics almost win the title. The KD-Kyrie Nets were never close to sniffing one, and they really didn’t take anything out of the Durant and Irving era except a plan on how not to build a supercomputer.
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(Photo by Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)